Katharina Fritsch
Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
Through May 27
On top of the Chicago Board of Trade is a 32-foot tall aluminum statue of Ceres, made by John Storrs in 1930. Storrs shows the Roman goddess of grain and plenty as faceless; in one hand she holds stalks of wheat, in the other a bag of grain (sometimes identified as a bag of money), symbolizing Chicago’s role as the mercantile center of America’s agricultural bounty, as the place where the fecund richness of the Midwest meets the marketplace.
This provided additional local resonance, intended or not, for Katarina Fritsch’s installation Heart with Wheat at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Fritsch had 40,000 identically stylized shafts of wheat cast in metal, each around eight inches long and painted in a range of acidic shades of green, yellow, and gold, and then arranged them directly on the museum floor into the shape of a 45-foot heart. This piling up of stuff, its sheer inundation into excess, became a glittering heap of abundance, a shining allegory hinting at the fruits of the earth and their transmission into value, into coinage.
The heart shape is carefully laid out, and the metal casts of wheat stack up three or four deep in a peculiar and glistening harvest. Like Storrs’s glossy Ceres, Fritsch’s bits of metal had a kind of art deco feel, a bulbous exaggeration in scale coupled with jewel-like rhythms and elegance. But this installation’s heart shape began to seem precious and arbitrary. The burden of this upbeat descent into cliché and amiability became more than the work was able to congeal, challenge or overcome.
Heart with Wheat reads as a big small piece, an impressive surfeit of material layered into a somewhat strained conjoining of encumbered symbols of love and nourishment. Fritsch’s inventiveness appeared more visible in her substances and scale than in her construction and consideration of context, and this installation had a breezy easiness and affability that finally made it seem both lovely and irrelevant.
James Yood
